Trusting privacy in the cloud

Cloud computing technologies can increase innovation and economic growth considerably. Because of privacy concerns, however, many users underutilize cloud technologies. This paper designs an institution attenuating the problem: a two-layered certification scheme built around a private, nonprofit organization called cloud association. This association is governed by representatives of both users and cloud service providers and sources auditing and certification of providers out to independent for-profit certifiers. It is shown how this institution incentivizes providers to produce high data security, and users with strong privacy preferences to trust them and pay a premium for their services